Apple has just announced from the iPad 3 event that their popular voice assistant, Siri, will be making its way to customers in Japan. It will be part of iOS 5.1 which will be available starting today. Siri will be rolled out in Japan over the next few weeks.

Siri is currently available in the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Germany, and France. This aligns with Apple's plan to roll out Siri to even more countries during 2012.

The long-in-beta iOS 5.1 software has a Gold Master (GM) candidate, build 9B176, and has passed quality assurance (QA) testing by Apple and their carrier partners. According to Will strafach of Chronic Wire:

A new bug found in iOS 5.0.1 may allow an unauthorized user to access your contacts, make phone calls, or use FaceTime on your passcode-protected iPhone. But stop panicking, this bug isn't easily reproduced - it requires you to have either no service or the sim card removed. Your average snoop won't find it worth their time.

iOS 5.1 has been in beta for a while now, but it looks like several features have remained hidden from developers thus far -- potentially including rich text formatting for the Notes app. Previously limited to just plain text, iPhone Hellas reports that users will soon be able to include bulleted lists, links, underlined text, change the font color and more.

iOS 5.1Many folks are awaiting the impending release of iOS 5.1 for their iOS devices but with no solid date to refer to some are now turning to various other resources such as some recently published operator profiles for clues.

Apple may have begun testing what appears to be ZFS (Zettabyte File System) support in the latest iOS 5.1 beta. If the information received by iMore is accurate. references to ZFS, including the mounting tools, are contained deep inside the system files. This raises a lot of questions about where Apple may be taking iOS storage in the future.